Law Commons^™

Teece's Competing Through Innovation, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews David J. Teece's book, Competing Through Innovation: Technological Strategies and Antitrust Policies (2013).

Gender Diversity In The Patent Bar, Saurabh Vishnubhakat

Faculty Scholarship

This article describes the state of gender diversity across technology and geography within the U.S. patent bar. The findings rely on a new gender-matched dataset, the first public dataset of its kind, not only of all attorneys and agents registered to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office, but also of attorneys and agents on patents granted by the USPTO. To enable follow-on research, the article describes all data and methodology and offers suggestions for refinement. This study is timely in view of renewed interest about the participation of women in the U.S. innovation ecosystem, notably the provision …

Which Patent Systems Are Better For Inventors?, James Bessen, Grid Thoma

Faculty Scholarship

International comparisons of patent systems are essential to harmonization treaties and to analyze economic growth. Yet these comparisons often rely on little but conventional wisdom. This paper develops an empirical method to compare the economic strength and quality of patent systems by using renewal analysis of matched patents in different countries (same patent family). Comparing patents on the same inventions filed at the EPO for Germany and in the US, we find that the German patents generate substantially greater market power than their US equivalents, especially for small inventors. Also, the average US patent has relatively lower economic value (“quality”).

The 360° Of Information Fluency Delivery To Freshman Engineering Students, Marian G. Armour-Gemmen, Robin A.M. Hensel, Mary L. Strife

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

For three years, engineering librarians from West Virginia University (WVU) have been teaching information fluency skills to 700-1000 freshman engineering students per year, using a specific information fluency cycle. The librarians’ responsibilities in the Fall 2013 course syllabus included teaching once in each section, providing a two-hour, in-library group sessions to accommodate almost 700 students, delivering an intellectual property Blackboard™ module for students to complete over a specific period of time, and requiring students to complete a Plagiarism Avoidance Tutorial with quiz. Some of these components are similar to those of past semesters. However, past collection of the data was …

What Patent Attorney Fee Awards Really Look Like, Saurabh Vishnubhakat

Faculty Scholarship

This essay gives an empirical account of attorney fee awards over the last decade of patent litigation. Given the current attention in legislative proposals and on the Supreme Court’s docket to more liberal fee shifting as a check on abusive patent litigation, a fuller descriptive understanding of the current regime is of utmost importance to forming sound patent litigation policy. Following a brief overview of judicial experience in patent cases and trends in patent case filing, this study presents analysis of over 200 attorney fee award orders during 2003-2013.

The study confirms the commonsense view that plaintiffs have tended to …

The Growing Public Domain In Medicine, Saurabh Vishnubhakat

Faculty Scholarship

This essay describes the growing public domain of inventions associated with drugs and medicine, and geographies associated with identifiable shifts in the balance of innovation that may be especially favorable for promoting wider access to socially useful technologies. To do so, it departs from the largely ex ante perspective that currently informs the intersectional debate regarding human rights and patent rights and, instead, looks backward to inquire what innovations from past patents have already become publicly available in service of the human rights objective of greater access to technology. Ex post analysis of this kind may help public and private …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Law, Business, And Economics Scholars In Alice Corp. V. Cls Bank, No. 13-298, Jason Schultz, Brian Love, James Bessen, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

The Federal Circuit’s expansion of patentable subject matter in the 1990s led to a threefold increase in software patents, many of which contain abstract ideas merely tethered to a general-purpose computer. There is little evidence, however, to suggest this expansion has produced an increase in software innovation. The software industry was highly innovative in the decade immediately prior to this expansion, when the viability of software patentability was unclear and software patents were few. When surveyed, most software developers oppose software patenting, and, in practice, software innovators tend to rely on other tools to capture market share such as first-mover …

The Standard For Awarding Attorney Fees Under 35 U.S.C. Section 285 To Prevailing Parties In Patent Litigation - Octane Fitness, Llc V. Icon Health & Fitness, Inc. And Highmark, Inc. V. Allcare Health Management Systems, Dennis D. Crouch, Jafon Fearson

Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court granted certiorari in two patent infringement cases that both concern shifting of attorney fees under the “exceptional case” standard of 35 U.S.C. § 285. The Federal Circuit has traditionally been resistant to fee shifting awards—especially in cases where an accused infringer is the prevailing party. In Octane Fitness, petitioner asks the Court to lower the standard for proving an exceptional case. In Highmark, petitioner asks for deference to lower court exceptional case findings.

Patent Dialogue, Jonas Anderson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article examines the unique dialogic relationship that exists between the Supreme Court and Congress concerning patent law. In most areas of the law, Congress and the Supreme Court engage directly with each other to craft legal rules. When it comes to patent law, however, Congress and the Court often interact via an intermediary institution: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In patent law, dialogue often begins when Congress or the Supreme Court acts as a dialogic catalyst, signaling reform priorities to which the Federal Circuit often responds.

Appreciating the unique nature of patent dialogue has important …

Casting A Frand Shadow: The Importance Of Legally Defining "Fair And Reasonable" And How "Microsoft V. Motorola" Missed The Mark, Rebecca Haw Allensworth

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

High tech markets must strike an awkward balance between coordination and competition in order to achieve efficiency. The need for competition is familiar; antitrust--as well as many other legal institutions--recognizes that consumers benefit and resources are best allocated when producers face fierce competition. But at the same time, the interoperability of competing high tech products can promote both consumer and producer welfare, necessitating a level of coordination not typically associated with atomistic, competitive markets. The necessity of interoperability has been addressed privately by industry-wide standard-setting and coordination of competitors around these standards. Likewise, the competitive risks of that coordination are …

Big Banks And Business Method Patents, Megan M. La Belle, Heidi Mandanis Schooner

Scholarly Articles

The banking industry and the patent system are longstanding American institutions whose histories date back to the founding of this country. Historically, however, the paths of these two institutions rarely crossed. Although financial firms have been increasing their innovative output for decades now, until recently they relied on trade secrecy, first mover advantages, and other business mechanisms to protect and monetize their intellectual property — not patents.

Through a convergence of circumstances over the past several years, that pattern has changed. The shift began when the Federal Circuit decided that business methods — banks’ primary mode of innovation — are …

U.S. Executive Branch Patent Policy, Global And Domestic, Arti K. Rai

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Diagnostic Patents At The Supreme Court, Arti K. Rai

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Making Do In Making Drugs: Innovation Policy And Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Law Faculty Scholarship

Despite increasing recalls, contamination events, and shortages, drug companies continue to rely on outdated manufacturing plants and processes. Drug manufacturing’s inefficiency and lack of innovation stand in stark contrast to drug discovery, which is the focus of a calibrated innovation policy that combines patents and FDA regulation. Pharmaceutical manufacturing lags far behind the innovative techniques found in other industries due to high regulatory barriers and ineffective intellectual property incentives. Among other challenges, although manufacturers tend to rely on trade secrecy because of the difficulty in enforcing patents on manufacturing processes, trade secrecy provides limited incentives for innovation. To increase those …

Congress As A Catalyst Of Patent Reform At The Federal Circuit, Jonas Anderson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is the dominant institution in patent law. The court’s control over patent law and policy has led to a host of academic proposals to shift power away from the court and towards other institutions, including the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and federal district courts. Surprisingly, however, academics have largely dismissed Congress as a potential institutional check on the Federal Circuit. Congress, it is felt, is too slow, too divided, and too beholden to special interests to effectively monitor changes in innovation and respond with appropriate reforms. …

The Influence Of The Andean Intellectual Property Regime On Access To Medicines In Latin America, Laurence R. Helfer, Karen J. Alter

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter is a contribution to "Balancing Wealth and Health: Global Administrative Law and the Battle over Intellectual Property and Access to Medicines in Latin America," Rochelle Dreyfuss & César Rodríguez-Garavito, eds. Part I of the chapter explains how the repeated interactions between the Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ) and domestic IP agencies in the Andean Community helped to build an effective IP rule of law and to solidify pro-consumer interpretations of regional patent and trademark rules. Part II documents how ATJ judges and agency officials enabled Andean governments to resist pressure from the United States and its pharmaceutical industry …

Standard Essential Patents, Trolls, And The Smartphone Wars: Triangulating The End Game, Daryl Lim

Faculty Scholarly Works

Few legal issues in recent years have captured the public's attention more powerfully than litigation over standard essential patents ("SEPs"). This Article explains how SEP litigation overlaps with two other major centers of patent litigation-litigation involving smartphones and patent assertion entities ("PAEs"). It observes that attempting to pre-empt patent hold-ups by imposing blanket ex ante disclosure obligations and royalty caps on standard setting organizations ("SSOs") is misdirected and counterproductive. Instead, the solution lies in clear and balanced rules to determine "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" (FRAND) royalties and injunctive relief. This solution will help parties make more realistic assessments of their …

Patent Examiners And Litigation Outcomes, Shine Tu

Law Faculty Scholarship

Conventional wisdom argues that unnecessary litigation of low quality patents hinders innovation, and that the PTO could play a role with its high grant rates. Accordingly, it is important to answer these questions: (1) which patent examiners are issuing litigated patents, (2) are examiners who are "rubber stamping" patents issuing litigated patents at a disproportionately higher rate, and (3) are examiners with less experience issuing more litigated patents? In sum, do patent examiners who issue litigated patents have common characteristics? Intuition would argue that those examiners who issue the most patents (approximately one patent every three business days) would exhibit …

Patents At Issue: The Data Behind The Patent Troll Debate, Jonathan H. Ashtor, Michael J. Mazzeo, Samantha Zyontz

Faculty Scholarship

The debate over "patent trolls"' is raging at full tilt and its fury is stoked by fundamental questions about patent assertion. Both sides are struggling to understand which patent assertion practices are consistent with the purpose of patent rights and which are abusive and result in net social costs. This Article addresses patent assertion concretely through empirical analysis of actual infringement awards. In particular, this Article studies all awards granted for findings of patent infringement in U.S. district courts between 1995 and 2011, and, with targeted analyses, focuses on cases involving patent assertion entities ("PAEs"). This Article specifically investigates certain …

Toward A Closer Integration Of Law And Computer Science, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Legal issues increasingly arise in increasingly complex technological contexts. Prominent recent examples include the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), network neutrality, the increasing availability of location information, and the NSA’s surveillance program. Other emerging issues include data privacy, online video distribution, patent policy, and spectrum policy. In short, the rapid rate of technological change has increasingly shown that law and engineering can no longer remain compartmentalized into separate spheres. The logical response would be to embed the interaction between law and policy deeper into the fabric of both fields. An essential step would …

Consumer Welfare In Competition And Intellectual Property Law, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Whether antitrust policy should pursue a goal of "general welfare" or "consumer welfare" has been debated for decades. The academic debate is much more varied than the case law, however, which has consistently adopted consumer welfare as a goal, almost never condemning a practice found to produce an actual output reduction or price increase simply because productive efficiency gains accruing to producers exceeded consumer losses.

While some practices such as mergers might produce greater gains in productive efficiency than losses in consumer welfare, identifying such situations would be extraordinarily difficult. First, these efficiencies would have to be "transaction specific," meaning …

Preliminary Injunctions Post-Mayo And Myriad, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

The Supreme Court's recent interest in patentable subject matter has had several, unexpected downstream effects on preliminary injunctions in patent disputes.

The Supreme Court has recently expressed increased interest in patent eligibility, or patentable subject matter, the doctrine that limits the types of inventions eligible for patenting. Its two decisions, Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., in 2012, and Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., in 2013, represented the first broad restrictions on patentable subject matter in over thirty years. And later this term, the Court will decide yet another patent eligibility case: Alice Corp. v. CLS …